Anger is an energy. A young girl, a slave in the South, is presented with a moment where she can grasp for freedom, for change, for life. She grabs it with both hands, fiercely and intensely, and the spirit world is shaken.

Highlights from the Blog

Though science is a wide-ranging and varied pursuit, science fiction tends to focus almost exclusively on astronomy and physics, with the occasional dip into medical science. But that’s changing. Pioneers like Ursula Le Guin began to center anthropology and sociology in the genre fifty years ago, and today we’re seeing SF that explores environmental science, molecular biology, neuroscience, and more. My particular favorite is geology, also known as Earth science—or, if you’re beyond our little blue marble, planetary science.

My new novel The Future of Another Timeline is about time traveling geologists, and my inspirations come from other books that foreground the work of people who taste rocks, control plate tectonics, and explore the ecosystems of other worlds. Here are seven works that define the new subgenre of geoscience fiction.

The Chosen One is a trope that predates the genre of fantasy and even literature itself. It certainly pops up in just about every religious scripture, Arthurian legend, most mythologies, and seems to permeate our modern day media, from fantasy books to anime, video games, and popular TV shows. You could even say that this trope occurs in the real world, when we hold up some politician or leader as the one that’s going to solve all our problems and save the world. Chosen Ones can be chosen by another person or entity, their lineage, a prophecy, some particular trait they possess (i.e. being “pure of heart”), or some action that they themselves take.

It’s become such a staple of the fantasy genre in particular that nearly all fantasy stories incorporate or invoke the trope in some manner. It can also be pretty lazy storytelling. It can override the hero’s agency. The plot of a Chosen One story tends to bend to this trope, along with just about every other character in the story. So what if this random person doesn’t seem like the best choice to defeat the forces of darkness? He’s the chosen one! The hero’s connection to the main conflict in the story is manufactured. It’s not personal, it’s just dictated by the nature of the trope. It’s an excuse to involve an everyman type of character in a huge, world-spanning conflict that they otherwise would have no connection to. But that is also part of the trope’s strength—that it makes a hero out of a character the audience can fully relate to, be it a high school cheerleader in Buffy the Vampire Slayer or a young son of a slave in The Phantom Menace.

In this scattershot series, we’ll be delving “too greedily and too deep,” prying gems out of the glorious rough that is the extended legendarium of Tolkien’s world. This includes drawing on The Lord of the Rings itself, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, The Children of Húrin, and the History of Middle-earth (or HoME) books.

Elf-kids these days! They’re so soft. They don’t know how good they’ve got it. Just Sauron, not Morgoth, is their big bad, and they can just hop on a boat at any time to escape the troubles of Middle-earth. That wasn’t an option for their parents. But then, war, love, and family have always been part of the Elven condition in Arda Marred—from the Elder Days to The Lord of the Rings days.

In the book Morgoth’s Ring, in the more-delightful-than-it-sounds section called “Laws and Customs among the Eldar,” the first thing Tolkien talks about is Elf-children. Which should immediately make us say: Wait! Why do we never read about them? Like, any of them. Are there any Eldar tykes in Middle-earth at the time of The Lord of the Rings? Might young Estel, a.k.a. Aragorn, have had one or two immortal playmates in Rivendell? Well, as with many things in his legendarium, Tolkien just doesn’t say. But we can infer some things based on Elven culture and reproductive conventions.

The concept of knowing when or how you might die is an interesting one that people have grappled with for centuries, an existential what-would-you-do thought puzzle of sorts. Most people assume they have years to live. But what if you were to die tomorrow? Wouldn’t you try to cheat death? It’s what made the Final Destination movies so compelling, and that concept has been updated with STX Entertainment’s new movie, Countdown.

Matt Reeves’ studio 6th & Idaho has acquired the rights to adapt Clifford D. Simak’s Hugo-winning novel Way Station as a film for Netflix, according to Deadline.

Reeves is best known for directing Cloverfield and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and is set to direct the next Batman film. His studio has a first-look film deal with Netflix, which is also working on an adaptation of George Orwell’s film Animal Farm, to be directed by Andy Serkis. There’s no indication as to when the adaptation of Way Station will hit Netflix—if it makes its way through the development pipeline—or who will direct it.

Alix E. Harrow, debut author of Ten Thousand Doors of January, recently hosted an AMA on Twitter. Harrow, a former history adjunct professor and part-time librarian, recently won a Hugo for her short story, “A Witch’s Guide to Escape,” and is a finalist for the Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. Many of Harrow’s AMA answers cover publishing, advice, inspiration, and her preferred fictional worlds and characters.

The two Marc Webb-directed Amazing Spider-Manmovies—particularly the second one—did a lot of work to set up a “Spider-Man Cinematic Universe.” Sony went ahead and green-lit a bunch of spinoff movie projects featuring Spider-characters The Sinister Six, Black Cat, Morbius the Living Vampire, Silver Sable, and Venom.

The whole concept was sent into a tizzy when (a) Amazing Spider-Man 2 did poorly at the box office and critically as well and (b) Spider-Man got absorbed into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But we got a Venom movie in 2018 anyhow.

Amazon’s Carnival Row has garnered some mixed reviews since it premiered last mont, but we really enjoyed it — a thoughtful Victorian drama that examines themes of racial inequality and colonialism. Prior to its debut, Amazon announced that it had renewed the series for a second season, meaning that those who enjoyed the first eight episodes will have something to look forward to.

J.K. Rowling has done much to revive the literary genre of boarding school stories, which achieved its greatest (pre-Potter) popularity in the period between Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and the mid-twentieth century. As a setting, boarding schools allow for the construction of thrilling narratives: concerned parents are replaced by teachers who may well prioritize student achievement over student welfare, e.g. maximizing points for Gryffindor over the survival of the students earning those points. Because the students cannot easily walk away from the school, they must deal with teachers and other students, some of whom may be vividly villainous (Miss Minchin, for example—the antagonist in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess).

Are there any SFF novels featuring boarding schools? Why yes! I am glad you asked—there are more than I can list in a single article. Here are just a few.

Looks like it’s finally House Targaryen’s turn to sit in the Big Pokey Boi. According to a new scoop from Deadline, a Game of Thrones prequel based on George R.R. Martin’s doorstopper Targaryen-history book, Fire & Blood, is reportedly nearing a pilot order from HBO.

Galactic dirtbag Gideon the Ninth is now on bookshelves, trashing up the place and attracting furtive glances from all walks of life (and unlife). With a character like this, any artist would struggle to capture their sweaty immediacy. But not only did artist Tommy Arnold visualize it perfectly, he also included clues and details that perfectly conveys the life of Gideon, which is a terrible one, and need not be duplicated or admired.

GET HYPE! Amazon Prime’s Wheel of Time adaptation has begun filming in Prague, and on Thursday, the cast shared their first group photo on Instagram. The picture, which seems to have been taken by Rosamund Pike, unites Moraine, al’Lan, Rand, Mat, Perrin, Nynaeve, and Egwene.

Jin Yong’s A Hero Born is a fantastical generational saga and kung fu epic, filled with an extraordinary cast of characters. This Chinese classic—coming to the U.S. for the first time on September 17th as translated by Anna Holmwood for St. Martin’s Press—is a tale of fantasy and wonder, love and passion, treachery and war, betrayal and brotherhood.

Want to start reading now? Tor.com is serializing selections from A Hero Born—you can find all the previous chapters here! And check back every morning this week for another installment of the third episode: “Swirling Sands”.